


Death and All His Friends

by LaVoileBlanche



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Established Relationship, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, POV Simon, Post-Season/Series 02, Post-Series, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Spoilers, Warming Up Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2016-11-02
Packaged: 2018-08-28 15:41:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8452111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaVoileBlanche/pseuds/LaVoileBlanche
Summary: Simon finds the poster when he’s not looking for it - a crumpled ball behind the kitchen door in Amy’s bungalow. BEWARE THE SIGNS OF RABIDIFICATION, it declares, bold front aggressive and unapologetic. 
(Simon and Kieren deal with Kieren's symptoms as they come.)





	

Simon finds the poster when he’s not looking for it - a crumpled ball behind the kitchen door in Amy’s bungalow. _BEWARE THE SIGNS OF RABIDIFICATION_ , it declares, bold front aggressive and unapologetic. Simon doesn’t run with the ULA anymore, for obvious reasons, but that doesn’t stop the familiar clench of anger in his gut. _Freddie Preston went rabid after one missed dose_ _,_ the paper tells him, and he spares a second to wonder where he’d ended up - he’s probably no better off than the teenage Henry Lonsdale, whose body they’ll never find. The so-called ‘symptoms’ of what they’ve dubbed ‘rabidification’ are bullet-pointed in a neat list:

  * TREMORS


  * FORGETFULNESS


  * NOSEBLEEDS



There’s no course of action recommended on the page, but Simon knows too well what Maxine and Gary would have been pedalling about the village - shoot first, ask questions later. Worse still is the knowledge that they would have gotten away with it. There’s not a court in the whole of the country that would convict someone Living of murder if they thought it was self-defense. And no need to examine too closely whether or not it was.

He still remembers those disgusting Victus adverts, when they’d first started sending them back from the treatment centre, warning people about the “signs of the B.E.A.S.T” like the Undead were just animals, biding their time. _Bile, eyes, amnesia, shaking, time,_  like it was an inevitability that they would attack. There was a petition about taking them off the TV, Simon remembers, but he doesn’t know if it passed or failed. It hardly matters now. He tosses the paper in the bin and goes back to where Kieren is sitting, cross-legged on the floor with a chessboard in front of him. He’d found it in Amy’s loft, and he tells Simon that they are both going to learn how to play. Simon, who exchanged everything for the line of Kieren’s jaw cradled in his hands and would do it again, does not object. He folds himself down onto the carpet and watches Kieren set the pieces in place, one at a time.

*

He remembers the poster only later that week, when he is flicking quietly through a Borges collection and Kieren is sketching on the sofa beside him, the scratch of his pencil across the thick page the only noise in the room.

_“Shit,”_ Kieren says, under his breath, and when Simon glances up, he is looking down at his trembling hand. The pencil has rolled onto the floor, and where the sketchbook is tilted towards him on Kieren’s lap, Simon can see the ruined line of Jemima’s ear where the shaking had taken over. Something chill and hollow climbs into his chest.

“You alright?” He asks, and Kieren looks at him, shakes his hand out and clenches it into a fist against his stomach.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Okay,” Simon says. He reaches across the space between them and pulls Kieren’s feet into his lap, rubs his socked heels, and refuses to think about what it could mean. He goes back to his book, one hand resting on the ridge of Kieren’s pale ankle, and eventually, Kieren picks up his pencil again. Simon does not want to, but twice more he sees the shaking begin, like Kieren’s fractured nerves are twitching under his cold skin. It feels seismological. It feels like the first cracking ground of an earthquake.

That evening, while Kieren is out for tea with the Wilsons, though of course he doesn't eat, Simon fishes the flyer out of the recycling and rereads. He trails his fingers across the words of it, as if by his touch, he can make it read differently. _TREMORS_. He closes his eyes, and sees Kieren’s confused stare at the kinetic shudder of his own hand. This time, he folds the paper into quarters and puts it in his pocket.

*

They’re sitting in bed, Kieren’s knees bracketing Simon’s hips, his light touch ghosting over the bare skin of his back. Simon watches his face in the mirror. The walls are bare now; he has thrown away his idols, and the two of them are alone there together. Kieren grants Communion with every brush of his fingertips. His eyebrows crease as he runs a knuckle along the scar of Simon’s spine, and he meets his eyes in the mirror.

“How did you get these, Simon?”

Simon studies him, ghostly pale, marble and gold. He opens his mouth, and he tells him the story of his remaking, the shocked and painful way he’d passed from one state of undeath to another. Kieren keeps his eyes on him, and flinches at the horrors Simon spills to him. His cold and clever fingers find pause at Simon’s waist, clutching, and when Simon finishes his story, he tilts his head forward and kisses him, just at the base of his neck, before the scars begin.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I didn't know.”

Simon’s mouth almost smiles.

“‘Course you didn't,” he says, “I didn't tell anyone but the Prophet. S’not your fault.”

“Still.” Kieren shifts, removes himself from Simon’s back and sits beside him instead, looks at him in profile. “I’m sorry.”

Simon turns towards him. This close, he can see every single eyelash that frames those star-pupilled eyes.

“S’okay,” he says. His voice is soft and loaded. His gaze drops for a moment to Kieren’s mouth, and Kieren leans in to capture him in a kiss that is as tender as a new bruise. Simon’s eyes close and he cups the back of Kieren’s neck, sliding his fingers into his hair. He swears he feels God in the room.

*

They go to the Walkers’ for a Sunday roast neither of them will touch, and Kieren shows Simon his room. Simon brushes through the old clothes in his wardrobe as if they’re relics from a holy age.

“You were a punk?” He says, and Kieren, where he’s sitting on the bed, watching half-nervously, smiles a little.

“Used to be,” he says. Simon looks at him, and half of his mouth kicks up into a smile.

“Still are,” he says. He turns back to his slow examination of Kieren’s things, the books and paintings, the CDs. He touches them as if he’s trying to leave an impression of himself that will reach into Kieren’s first life, so that when he picks them up in all his teenage misery, he will feel how loved he is going to be.

He hears the creak of the mattress as Kieren stands, and watches him pick something off the floor. It’s a drawing. He sits back down and flattens it over his knee, trying to work the creases out, and when Simon stands beside him, he sees himself.

“You drew me?” He asks, surprised. On the page, he is figured in stark black lines.

“Yeah,” Kieren says, still smoothing out the edges. “When you were away.”

Simon sits down on the bed next to him. He puts two fingers on the edge of his jaw and gently turns him towards him. Kieren’s brow is furrowed, waiting for Simon to do whatever he’s going to do, but it straightens out when they kiss.

*

“Simon.”

Simon is cleaning the graffiti from the front of the bungalow, and he turns at Kieren’s voice from the doorway. Crosses the space between them in a heartbeat when he sees the thin line of black bridging the skin between Kieren's nose and his mouth.

Simon's mind, his traitorous mind, scrapes a line through the chalkboard of his thoughts, checking _NOSEBLEEDS_ off the list of symptoms he has been trying to ignore. Kieren's body is breaking, and he doesn't know how to fix it, but he rubs away the black trail of blood anyway, staining his sleeves with it, holding Kieren's face between his hands like he will never touch a thing more precious.

"You're fine," he murmurs, leaning their foreheads together. "You're fine, you're fine."

He doesn't know who he's trying to convince.

*

Kieren is pulling his boots on by the front door, shrugging into Simon’s coat.

“Where’re you going?” Simon calls from the sofa.

“To see Amy,” he says. “I want to let her know how Jem’s getting on with her counselling.”

There’s a pit in Simon’s stomach that he keeps falling into. He makes his voice as soft as he can when he stands, walks across to the door and says,

“Love, we did that already.”

Kieren looks up at him, confusion plain across his face until he remembers. He’s got one boot on, one boot off, and he stops trying to tie the laces.

“‘Course we did,” he says quietly. “I’d forgotten.”

“No harm in that,” Simon tells him, though he can feel the spiralling harm of it, cracking down through him. _FORGETFULNESS,_ his treacherous thoughts supply. “Come on, let’s have a game, yeah?”

He takes Kieren by the hand, hangs his coat back up and walks him into the living room where Amy’s chessboard is set up permanently now for someone to play it. Kieren follows in silence, a frown still bending his features, and Simon finds himself praying - please, God, don't take him from me.

*

There’s mutterings happening in Simon’s old crowd, Zoe and Brian the new heads of the ULA in Roarton. He is of course a traitor, no longer welcome in that circle, but he is not oblivious. At Give Back, a scheme that runs now with the most lukewarm support, they’re cleaning the bus stop of litter and graffiti, and Zoe arrives late, smirking as she passes by where Kieren and Simon sit by the side of the road. She stops just close enough that they can hear her when she mentions the Undead Prophet and his new mission for her to the group of other Redeemed that crowd around her.

“He says the Second Rising can still happen,” she says, and her eyes blaze triumphant in Simon’s direction for a second. “The First Risen is still in Roarton somewhere, and once we find them, we can make it happen.”

Simon very carefully does not let himself react, keeps his voice relaxed when he turns to Kieren and says, “You wanna go home?”

Kieren is watching the others with something bordering on disgust, and he nods. They stand, and Lisa Lancaster’s father does not make a move to stop them where he’s meant to be supervising. He’s not even armed.

“I can't believe they’re still going on about the Second Rising, after everything that happened,” Kieren says as they make their way back to the bungalow.

“I know,” Simon says.

“I mean, Amy died already, didn't she, and nothing happened! How many more people do they want to sacrifice before they realise it's all nonsense?”

“I know. It’s delusional.” Simon still believes half-heartedly in what the movement used to stand for, but he has stood with a knife in his hand and weighed that belief against the life of Kieren Walker, and found that it is not worth the cost. If anyone comes to the door who believes otherwise, Simon will crack their skull open and spill their brains, and he won't even need to be rabid to do it.

*

One morning he wakes to a cold and empty bed and the smell of toast. The now-familiar apprehension that settles around his shoulders like a blanket is the furthest thing from comforting, and Simon walks slow through the bungalow, into the kitchen. They keep bread, milk, tea, in case they have guests, but they never have use of them themselves. Kieren is watching the toaster with a frown on his face, and Simon says nothing but waits for him to work it out, feeling vaguely sick.

Understanding comes over Kieren’s face slowly, but the way it is replaced with horror is almost immediate. He snaps across the small space of the kitchen and yanks the toaster’s plug from the wall, and then he looks at Simon, eyes wide and beseeching. Simon doesn’t know what he can offer him, to make this better.

“Hungry?” He asks, not quite smiling, trying to make light of it. Kieren just stands with the plug in his hand, speechless.

“What am I doing, Simon?” He asks, “What’s happening to me?”

Simon feels suffocated, feels the dark wet press of the earth on him again. He pushes through it.

“I don't know, love,” he says. He crosses the kitchen and takes the plug from Kieren, sets it gently on the countertop and folds his boy into his arms. He kisses the crown of his head, right where the halo would be. “We’ll figure it out, though.”

Kieren sighs into his chest. He puts his hands on Simon’s waist and Simon closes his eyes. He would keep him always like this, if he could.

*

He starts taking the flyer out and reading it whenever Kieren’s not around, as if through his own determination he can make it tell him something new. He must get careless, one day, because he comes in from where he’s been planting new flowers in the garden, and finds Kieren on the sofa, staring down at the poster, shaking hands on its creased and worried edges. Dread drops like an anchor in his stomach.

"Kieren..." He says, voice soft. Kieren doesn't look up, but his trembling fingers clench around the paper.

"If I turn," he says, "will you -"

"No." Simon cuts him off before he can finish. Goes to him and kneels in front of him and takes his hands, kisses his knuckles. "No, Kieren. I won't."

He looks up at him, supplicant but unswerving. _Oh, my heart,_ he thinks. "Don't ask me to, Kieren. I can't."

He's got such tragic eyes, this boy of his. They look at him now and they're full of wounds, wounds Simon can't heal, not even if he tried with all the love in him.

“I don't want to be a monster, Simon,” he whispers, and his eyes search Simon’s for understanding. The paper crumples, just a little. Simon takes it from his hands and puts it down on the cushion beside his hip. He wills his fingers to be gentle against Kieren’s neck and he bends Kieren’s mouth towards him, and before their lips touch he says,

“You couldn't be.”

If Kieren goes rabid, Simon will keep him safe. Simon will go back to Norfolk like he swore he never would, and Simon will carve the answers out of Drs. Halperin and Weston, one way or another. He will be Frankenstein’s monster returned to the laboratory, and will tell them _we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful._ He could do it. He would, for Kieren, for the soft bulb in his throat, the moon-brightness of his eyes.

Kieren breaks the kiss and looks at him with such fear that Simon feels the break of it in his rotten heart.

“You’re gonna be alright, Kieren,” he says, and though Kieren looks doubtful, Simon knows he is making a promise.

*

They make an appointment with Dr. Russo even though it goes against every bone in Simon’s body, but he looks as helpless in the face of Kieren’s symptoms as they are.

“You have been taking your shot everyday, haven't you, Kieren? And none of that homemade brew?”

Kieren nods his head yes, fidgeting with his sleeve, and Simon thinks back to that morning, Kieren’s head bowed before him, the back of his neck exposed and Simon just stroking the bones of it while he gave the injection.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing I can help you with unless your symptoms get more… severe,” Russo says, and Simon fills in what he won't say - _unless you turn rabid_. “You should book a follow-up appointment with Denise, I’ll check some of the old books, see if I’ve missed anything, but in the meantime, just keep an eye on it.”

Denise stays well back from the glass as they stand in reception and book Kieren’s next appointment. There’s an ugly, healing scar on her shoulder from the Rabid attack, and she flinches when she meets Simon’s eyes, but Simon doesn't have the energy to spare any guilt for her. He watches Kieren the whole walk home in silence. It’s like he’s cradling a priceless jewel, and he’s powerless to stop it from cracking. When they step through the door of the bungalow, Simon boxes Kieren in against the wall and kisses him in plain view of the street, committing every second of it to memory. There is no power on Earth, he swears, that he will let deprive him of this.

*

The Walkers know something is wrong, he thinks. Kieren is too quiet, the next time they come for dinner, and Sue, under the pretext of needing something lifted down from a high shelf, corners Simon in the kitchen.

“You two seem to be getting along okay,” she says. Simon glances at her and then away.

“Yeah,” he says, “we're doing alright.”

“I’m glad you decided to stay, Simon,” she says. “Kier’s not had a lot of luck with that, in the past.”

Simon knows. Simon has heard about Rick Macy, and sees his ghost, sometimes, in Kieren’s far-away gaze.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Simon says, and Sue squeezes his arm.

“I know, love,” she says. “You’ll look after him, won't you?”

She’s looking up at him with her gaze bold and a little bit afraid, and she reminds him of Kieren.

“‘Course I will.”

Simon hands her down the casserole dish she’d asked for and she smiles.

“I probably don't need this, after all,” she says. She sets it down on the side and gives Simon a conspiring look. “Shall we head back in?”

*

One afternoon, Simon talks Kieren into helping him weed the garden. The wintery sun shines on him as he laughs at something Simon has done with the sole intention of making him laugh, and then a change comes over his face, and he goes down backwards onto the frosted grass, his eyes rolling upwards and Simon already moving to catch him with the phantom sensation of a heart attack seizing his chest. Kieren’s limbs twitch with a brainless, heedless jerkiness, and Simon cradles his upper body, waits for the tremors to still and wipes the black blood from his nose, rocking him ever so slightly. When he comes back to himself, he blinks sluggishly and Simon strokes his cheek and feels blessed for the sharp whiteness of his eyes, for the fact that this is not his last day.

“What happened?” Kieren asks. Simon helps him slowly to his feet, and keeps his arm around him as they head inside, Kieren’s legs stumbling a little over the ground.

“Looked like a seizure,” Simon says. He seats them both down in the bedroom and brushes the hair out of Kieren’s face. “But you’re alright, now.”

Kieren is not appeased.

“Simon,” he says, and Simon closes his eyes and begs _please_ , just once. “Simon, am I changing?”

Simon opens his eyes.

“I don't know, Kieren,” he says, and despite everything, every moment of his miserable life that led to this, all the drugs and the betrayal and the guilt, this feels like his worst failing.

*

Shirley calls the bungalow, asking for Kieren, and Simon leans in the doorway of the bedroom while Kieren takes the call, watching the little flutters of movement on his face as she talks. He knows he’s starting to get overbearing, to crowd, but if there is a limit on the time he has left with this boy that he loves, he is not willing to waste a second of it. Besides, these days, with the tremors coming more and more often and the omnipresent threat that one day, Kieren will go down twitching and covered in black, and will come up as something inhuman, he seems to need Simon around as much as Simon needs him.

His hand starts to shake as he holds the phone to his ear, but it doesn't look like the regular thing. He looks at Simon, and something’s wrong. his eyes are wide and his mouth open, his throat working with no sound coming out. Simon goes to him, crouching in front of him, and he takes his hand.

“Thanks, Shirley,” Kieren manages, eventually. “Can I. Can I call you back?”

Simon can hear Shirley’s rambling affirmative as Kieren pulls the phone away from his ear and hangs up, letting it drop to the floor. He cups the side of Simon’s face.

“Simon,” he says. Simon’s name has never sounded so pure as it does when it comes from Kieren’s mouth, even now, when Kieren’s voice is wrecked with some emotion Simon can't name.

“What? What is it, Kieren?” With his spare hand, he touches Kieren’s knee, his thumb rubbing slow back-and-forths over the denim of his jeans. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s my symptoms, the nosebleeds and the amnesia and everything, they’re not -” he breaks off, takes a breath, tries again. “Dr. Russo mentioned them to Shirley, to see if she knew any more than he did about it, and she… Simon, Amy had the same thing.”

Amy, whose blood was red when Maxine killed her, whose eyes were brown and whose breath was warm for maybe a few hours before it was stolen forever. He has heard, through Kieren, Phillip’s story - how Amy, sweet, brilliant Amy, had been preparing for the worst the night before the féte and had instead been revived with a brand new heartbeat. How she had died from Maxine’s attack only because she could, because she had become fragile and human and alive again. Simon looks up at Kieren whose eyes are starting to blur a little with tears, and slowly, reverently, he lifts a hand to his chest. Kieren lets loose a breathless kind of laugh, a small thing that almost sticks in his throat on the way out. There’s no heartbeat yet, but soon -

“You’re not gonna go rabid,” Simon says, and this feels like a miracle - he was raised from his grave, redeemed from the earth like Lazarus, and yet this is what, more than anything, feels like resurrection. “Kieren, you’re gonna be okay.”

“Simon,” Kieren says, and how can Simon be blamed for the way he goes to him then, lays him flat on his back on the bed and kisses him for all he’s worth and more. Kieren is not dying. Kieren is not becoming a monster. Kieren, in all his stilted, awkward, beautiful glory, is coming alive again. Simon’s messiah, back once more from the grave. After this, they will go to the Walkers’ and to the surgery and maybe to the graveyard, but for now, Simon pins Kieren to the mattress with the weight of his body, and does his worship.

**Author's Note:**

> I rewatched this again recently and I'm just overcome with bitterness that they chose to cancel it. The best show ever created, probably.
> 
> The advert Simon mentions at the start of this is actually real - BBC Three has it on their website here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01zz2qm
> 
> Anyway, thanks for reading. I'm still really emo about In the Flesh, so if you want to come talk to me about it, I'm at queer-z0mbies.tumblr.com. Comments and kudos are, of course, much appreciated. Also, if you liked this, consider checking out my other In the Flesh fics!


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